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Catatonic Kid (CK) and Isabella have had an inspired exchange of posts in the last couple of months on the use of language and creativity to engage depression, take away its power and release creativity. There are so many ideas and evocative phrases in these posts that I’ve had trouble picking out responses from the dozens that run through me. So I’m going to start with notes on writing, creativity and language and how they relate to depression – and see where these jottings take me.

To be clear, though, I can only talk about how these basic elements help me in recovery. CK and Isabella have their own truths about words and creative imagination. Each of us responds differently, and what works for me may not work for another. So this is my take, a rough rendering of my truth – maybe it’s like yours, maybe not. There are as many paths to recovery as there are people trying to figure this out.

My imagination is expressed primarily through writing, and it helps distance me from the symptoms of depression by portraying them as different characters intruding on my life. These are my visitors from the theater of depression. I can laugh at them, kick them off stage or manage their movements and cues like the director of a play.

This shows me more precisely how they behave, what influence they try to have on me, as I attempted in this post. Imagining a character, say, who captures how my mind obsesses on painful moments sharpens my awareness and so helps me catch myself falling into that mode of thought. Naming things helps, then, but in a particular way that sets them in motion like friends of bad influence, patrons generous with evil gifts, manipulators of intimacy, perverse alchemists turning gold into lead. I don’t want any of them around. I certainly don’t want to live with them and let them control how I think and feel.

Writing itself is discovery. Ideas, flows of images linked to words, associations of one event with another arrive in mind that come in no other way. Putting the words together produces a guided energy that pushes around the boxes in the mind’s cluttered attic. Suddenly the useful springs out of old packing, and the beautiful emerges from cobwebbed obscurity. A touch of new life puts color into the rush of feeling and memory, and my tense neck relaxes once again.

This verbal and pictured imagination is my drug of choice. But it’s all the more devastating when my mind blanks out for a day or a week. A mental fog and fear take over, blocking not just words but new roads into recovery. I run into detours, closed exit ramps, and have to push on to the wrong destination where depression is waiting. The gas tank falls, a clunk on the pavement, and I’m running on empty. Maybe I’m squatting and pulling at my flat tire on a narrow shoulder of the freeway, feeling the wind of 70 mile an hour metal tonnage streaking by. It’s dangerous there! A tempting small move, the impulsive decision – it’s all over! That’s what it’s like when the living soul machine breaks, and the language and stories are lost. I’m desperate. I feel I’ll never write again, paralyzed! What am I alive for?

So I force myself back to a notebook or keyboard and write down something, anything to get myself going again. The first post I did on this blog consisted of two journal entries capturing this process – a paragraph naming what I was feeling in order to get going in the morning, and then a report back in the afternoon to say that things had begun breaking well for me the rest of the day. There it was – a self-prescribed dose of syntax like a finger snap in my awareness, a bit of sunlight through fog, a voice suddenly calling my name to startle me into action.

My mind simply awakens when I write. There are so many links to the unexpected – moments in my life I had thought lost, insight about something I’ve experienced that day. The ideas that come are not mental flashes but a slow nourishing rain, livening, raising hope like the smell of water in the desert air. It’s the contrast between seeing shadowy objects in a darkened room – all of them anonymous, asleep, lacking individuality – and then turning on the light to a shock of color and clear space in which each thing takes back its uniqueness and finds again its place in my life and memory.

Writing wraps my soul around purpose and builds a fire-like warmth as self and task become one. I’m on a different wavelength – or swimming in a fluid medium of no resistance. It’s not like a high or sudden rush but rather a deep dive and gliding in an underworld where life seems to start, where there is no barrier between me and what I see. It’s suddenly within me, a part of who I am, not just a thing to be labeled or defined externally. That is a place of genesis, fertility, birth.

As I was emerging from that place once, I had a painful vision of attempting to pull the living quality of experience into words, seeing the original vitality gradually lost as the source of the thought worked its way up through the winding nerves and blood vessels of the body to my mind and then tried to flow out through my hand, the pen it held in the form of words onto paper. But the result was only black scratchings, words that would hopefully evoke a semblance of the original. They seemed like dead shadows, still-born attempts to render a world impossible for words to capture. The best I can do is use language to approximate what I’ve tried to bring back with me from that underworld. It’ a clumsy verbal dance or charade with crude gestures trying to make things clear. Yet even then it retains a remembered power that strengthens life and intensifies energy.

So the writing experience at its very best and richest has a deeply healing quality that remains mysterious. But there are other parts of writing as well that are more like slow torture. There is the struggle to find a way in when nothing brightens a destination to let me know where to go next. And there is alway a long looking back to edit, squeeze, reshape in order to fit words more cleanly into a structure that lets others – readers – claim when is written down as a part of their own experience. Does the scene work, does the story connect?

And that is the final piece – the connection with readers, the response, the sharing within a community. That brings in another healing dimension of life. But that’s another story.

What are the ways you follow toward recovery? Do they include writing or other kinds of creative expression? If you blog or comment much, I imagine that writing plays some role in healing.